Wednesday, June 1, 2011

A Probing Tale

Dan ran into the bathroom and slammed the door, quickly locking it. With only one way into the room, he was sure he was safe from the aliens. Dan didn’t know why, but they always showed up when he slept in the nude. He sat on the toilet, his gun aimed at the door.

He felt a tickle on his butt cheeks then heard a small splash. Before Dan could react, the anal probe was inserted.

"Dammit! Not again!” he said. The last time they’d gotten him in bed as he slept in the nude.

Dan writhed in pain as nanobots shot out of the probe and escaped through the thin membrane into his bloodstream. They headed towards his brain. He gripped the sink and tried to move away but the probe dug into the tissue causing him more pain so he sat back down and didn’t try to move again.

The nanobots attached to his brain and started downloading his knowledge and memories. When they were done, he could feel them detaching and slipping back into the bloodstream. As they neared the probe they were sucked out. Dan could feel his innards being pulled downward with the suction.

He screamed in pain. “Please stop!”

They pulled the probe, full of the nanobots and his stool, out of his anus and it disappeared back down the pipes to the sewer.

Dan fell to the floor. He hurt more than he’d ever hurt before. Even passing a kidney stone two years ago had been less painful. Dan was sure death would be preferable and took his gun then shot himself in the head. The aliens outside the door broke in and teleported his body to the spaceship for dry-freeze storage.

Meanwhile, the aliens in the sewers flushed away the extraneous stuff and put the nanobots into a test tube labeled with Dan’s name. They teleported back to their spaceship then took the test tube to the laboratory where a robot named Dan II, which had been created with Dan’s DNA, waited. They loaded the nanobots into the robot and they formed a brain inside the head.

The aliens entered some codes into the computer and wirelessly transmitted the start-up sequence to the robot. Dan II’s eyes flickered open and he looked around. “Who are you and where is my house?” he said as he stood up then moved away from the aliens.

“We are not here to hurt you, we want to help earthlings,” the alien said.

“What do we need help with?”

“Overpopulation and not enough food for everyone,” the alien answered.

“How?”

“We have provided you with the information and it will be activated after you awake tomorrow.”

“What if I won’t do it?” Dan II asked.

“You have no choice; you cost too much to make for this to fail. We are going to power you down now. When you awake you’ll have no memory of this.”

Dan II tried to protest but it was too late; the shut down sequence had been sent to his body. They moved his lifeless body to the transport chamber and closed it, then sent Dan II to Dan’s house.

The aliens undressed him and put him into bed before teleporting back to the spaceship. The start-up sequence was sent along with the codes for the plans to fix the Earth’s woes. Dan II slept through all of it.

Dan II woke up when his alarm clock went off. He sat up then looked around. Everything looked normal but he couldn’t shake a feeling that something had happened last night. He chalked it up to drinking too much then went downstairs. Dan II started making coffee when the plans to fix the overpopulation and food shortage loaded into his head.

“That’s brilliant,” he said aloud.

He called work and quit then went to the bank to get a loan. When he got there, he discovered that he had received a huge boost to his bank account that morning that would more than cover the costs for the project.

Dan II built several storage silos on some land he bought out in the country. Next, he built a factory with a machine that could turn any living creature into highly nutritious compost that when used by farmers to grow more and better crops.

The aliens, who had been monitoring the progress, teleported a dozen poor and homeless people to Dan II’s factory to test it out. He ran them through it then tested the compost. It was better than anything on the market.

The next day he sent samples out to farmers in the area. They were impressed by the nearly instant difference and ordered tons of the compost. Every night after that the aliens teleported hundreds of poor and homeless people to the factory then Dan II shipped the compost out.

The news was filled with reports of missing people and the sudden boom in farmer’s crops, which eased both the overpopulation and the food shortage. The subsequent effect was a higher quality of life for all Earthlings. No one made a connection to Dan II and the aliens were pleased with their plan.

All was going well until Dan II bumped his head and the nanobots were temporarily dislodged. When they started working again, his knowledge of right and wrong had been restored and he could no longer kill humans and turn them into compost. In fact, he was going to turn himself into the police the next day for the murders he had committed.

The aliens couldn’t have the truth about Dan II’s technology discovered. That night the aliens teleported Dan’s dead body back to the house then teleported Dan II back to the spaceship and powered him down. When the aliens returned home, they reported their findings: “The human conscience is more powerful than our programming. We must remove it and free will before we can move forward with the plans to purify the Earthlings’ DNA for our consumption.”